Virtual Pants

Ellis Hamburger for The Verge:

In building a native Facebook app for iOS, the company looked at improving three key places, all relating to speed: launching the app, scrolling through the News Feed, and tapping photos inside the News Feed. “We’re twice as fast in all these areas,” Johnson says. The new app uses much of the same codebase as the company’s recently released Facebook Camera and Facebook Messenger apps, which we’re told were released in part to gauge users’ reaction to native applications. The new app’s photo view takes cues from Facebook Camera, and the app’s Messages screen is a clone of the Facebook Messenger app itself.

Great news for Facebook users. The Facebook iOS app has been slow and clumsy for quite some time now. Which is ironic, because it is likely the most popular app in the App Store. Facebook’s latest Camera and Messaging apps by comparison are much faster and intuitive, so it’s great to hear that the new Facebook for iOS app will be using much of the same codebase.